The Government Wants Your Kids

As kids head back to school, a poll of kindergarten teachers shows that they are nearly unanimous in the belief that more children would succeed in school if all families had access to quality pre-kindergarten programs. At a news conference releasing the poll results, law enforcement leaders will cite research showing that denying quality pre-k programs to at-risk kids greatly increases the risk they will become criminals.

Gee, can you get any more "SAVE THE CHILLLLLLLLDREN!" vibes into this paragraph? We must provide all children with pre-kindergarten programs or our children will grow up to become criminals!

So what's wrong with this piece of tripe? Well, to start with, it's based upon a poll of kindergarten teachers. Polls are occasionally useful to measure opinions, but they are emphatically not useful as replacements for actually doing analysis. Even narrow polls of experts in a field -- and whether kindergarten teachers are experts in anything more than babysitting is debatable -- do not necessarily reflect reality.

In this case, the poll is also inherently biased; of course teachers want more pre-k school programs paid for by the government. More pre-k programs will make their task easier, employ more teachers, and generally reinforce their perception of importance. So the results are hardly unexpected. And speaking of results, they don't bother to report any; we can't tell if the poll said 51% of teachers thought that more pre-k programs would help, or if 100% said so. But I expect they would have reported the numbers if they were subtantially greater than a majority, because it makes a better soundbite.

What else is wrong here? Well, the language itself is biased. Who wants to "deny quality pre-k programs to at-risk kids"? But we're not talking about denying anything, we're talking about funding a new government mandate, and taking children from their parents a year ahead of time. There's a large gap between denying kids from entering into pre-k, and paying for them to enter pre-k.

You gotta love the way they claim that research will be cited at the press conference. I guess people reading the press release should just take it on faith rather than checking the research, hmm?

In at least half the classrooms across the country, one out of five kids were inadequately prepared when they started school last year.

This doesn't surprise me, since our public schools are generally known to be failing miserably at anything resembling education. I'm curious to know how putting at-risk kids in a pre-k program at government expense will change things, though. How "unprepared" can you be for kindergarten?

This is another way to lie with statistics: you state multiple poll results as if they were related, when in fact the only relation between them is that they happened to be on the same poll. Note that the poll refers to "when they started school" -- which could be a kindergarten program... but is more likely to be read as "started the school year".

Most teachers said the time they spend dealing with disruptive behavior by poorly-prepared students, and helping them catch up, negatively affects the progress of well-prepared students.

Well, no shit. But how will a pre-k program do anything more than shift the burden of socialization to pre-k teachers? What indications do we have that pre-k programs will improve the situation? How do we know that pre-k programs won't be completely ineffective at solving the problem, leaving us with yet another government mandate and nothing to show for it?

It's interesting also to note the implied subtext here. If kindergarten students are unprepared without a pre-k program, the Democratic Indoctrination Wing (eg, the teacher's unions) is essentially accusing the Democratic Proletariat (eg, black inner-city residents) of being unfit to raise children. Without addressing the truth or falsehood of that question, which is really a determination that needs to be made on an individual basis, it's interesting to consider the attitude that implies.

I'll spell it out for you: "You are not fit to raise children; give them to us." Sounds inflammatory when translated out of government-speak, doesn't it? And so it should. It doesn't help that the nation's public schools aren't exactly models of success at the raising-children thing.